Building Progressive Web Apps

Chapter 1. Introducing Progressive Web Apps

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Once every few years, the web experiences a pivotal moment. A moment where several separate technologies click together and make a splash in the public’s eye. These may be existing technologies that have been around for years or newer ones that have just now gained browser support. But to the outside observer, it seems like there is one shining moment in which the web suddenly takes a leap forward.

We saw this happen with Ajax, which one day exploded seemingly out of nowhere (despite much of the underlying technology, such as XMLHttpRequest being around for years) and changed our notion of the web as a series of linked, mostly static, pages.

Ajax itself was a part of the Web 2.0 revolution, another powerful name that seemingly popped out of nowhere in 2004 and exploded overnight.

A few years later, mobile-first came into the spotlight and signaled a shift in how we look at web development. By giving a name to a set of design philosophies, these two words gained incredible power. With just two words we could shout out that the days of the user ...